Posted-Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1995 20:10:45 -0500
From: Joel Downs (jdowns@dornfeld.ME.Berkeley.EDU)

Ventura was truly awesome...  more impressive than Santa Cruz last year.

> from OC. The opener was Zom (sp?).  Zom sounds like TOOL (I

Some of the crowd seemed to like these guys, but my friend and I found em 
pretty boring...  I couldn't tell a damn thing the singer was saying, and 
there seemed to be a lot of pre-recorded shit from his synthesizer.  We 
kept praying for them stop.  Almost as bad as Laundry last year, who got 
virtually yelled off the stage.

> Now, I'd read some of the concert reports about Maynard and 
> how he stares out over the crowd as he sings.  And boy, are 
> they right.  He looks like he's staring RIGHT AT YOU.

God, from the third row, he is kinda f'ing scary...  loved it.

> was jumping up and down a good two to three feet!  Because of
> this, and also because it was impossible to see more than one 
> person on stage at a time, I made my way up to the balcony.
> Now, I'm hardly short (5'11"), but these events always make me
> feel puny, cause it seems like there are always three people
> six and a half feet tall in front of me.  The view from the 
> balc was unobstructed.

Aw, c'mon - there was room up front!  I'm 5'10", and I worked my way to 
the pit halfway thru the Tool set.  ;)  There's nothin like the pit 
during "Prison Sex"

> Oh, for part of the spoken word in Bottom, I think Paul came
> out to do it.  Next song was called "Animal" (the only one

Sorry, that was not Paul - it was the lead "singer" (I use the term 
loosely) from Zom.

> They only played for 1 1/2 hours, which at first pissed me 
> off, but then they've only had the new bass player for a short
> time, so we were probably only getting the songs he knew well 
> anyway.  Although they could've made him learn something from 
> "Opiate"; they didn't play anything from that :(.

True, it was short, but definitely worth it anyways...  

I was undecided about whether the visual stuff above the stage (two 
screens with constant repeating images flashing across them) added 
anything to the concert.  I think I would have preferred to not have it 
there; it was just distracting.  Any thoughts?

Did you hear that incredible bass just before the band came out?  I was 
seriously afraid of them triggering an earthquake.

Toolin along,
Joel